Tag: civility

Everything seems a little frantic at the moment. Feelings are running high and there are a lot of people letting their emotions doing their thinking.

Every time I turn on the news I hear people abusing each other whether that is politicians or world leaders abusing each other or overreacting or protesters shouting abuse at politicians live on television.

The media appears to be highlighting all that disconnects us, leaver or remainer, Democrat or Republican, Left wing or Right wing, Muslim, Jew or Christian, Male or Female, Pro-Gun or gun control. You are with us or against us mentality.

Then I go to work and I hear about staff being dismissive and ignoring new staff, senior staff appearing thoughtless towards each other and direct reports and members of the public verbally and physically abusing staff.

Life is tough at the moment, especially in healthcare, our population is getting older we are facing more and more complex conditions. Healthcare industry is growing faster than economies around the world, and are therefore under resourced. This creates an enormous amount of pressure on the workforce, and add on that societies’ expectation for state of the art health care and you create a toxic environment. Then we have populist politics which thrives on scarcity and difference and we have angry people on all sides, including those that think anyone who is different from them are the cause to all the problems we are facing.

We need to stop the line, we all need to start being civil with those around us. We all know what it feels like to be under attack verbally by a colleague a friend or a loved one. So if we know how it feels and we know that we are not in danger, then we have a choice not to inflict that kind of harm on others.

Ask yourself what you are telling yourself, what assumptions are you making about why you feel the way you feel? What emotion are you feeling and why is that? Will tearing someone off a strip change the situation? Can you change the situation yourself or is it out of your hands? If you cannot change it, what does being angry about it achieve? Is there a better way to deal with it?

If we all pause and think about how we are about to react before we react, then we can turn this epidemic of incivility off and start concentrating on what connects us.